Facebook Game: Dragon City Review

Written By Gamelysis
on Thursday, September 20, 2012 | 10:45:00 PM

(Play Dragon City on Facebook)
Dragon City is a Facebook game developed by Spanish developer Social Point, creators of the successful Social Empires and Social Wars (formerly Men vs. Women).

Dragon City gameplay revolves around building habitats for dragons, hatching dragon eggs, breeding types of dragon together and ensuring that the player’s increasingly large menagerie stays well fed. Dragon city’s basic processes involved in hatching, building, housing and feeding dragons through a simple tutorial and then repeatedly encourage them to follow these procedures through a series of quests. There is not a specific “story” to follow. That means the main target for progression is to earn gold, level up and fill out the “Dragon Book” with all(159 types of dragon currently in the game). Some of these dragons may be discovered simply by hatching new eggs, some may be discovered by feeding a dragon enough for them to “evolve” and others may be found by breeding two different types of dragon together. Some dragons are also awarded as daily bonuses, and others may be acquired by using the in-game “recruitment tavern” to get friends to help.

Dragon City has some potential but it’s lacking in a few key areas to make it an “essential play” title at this time. The quests are drab and lack character, whereas a sense of narrative progression would provide a stronger impetus for the player to follow these through. The unbalanced currency requirements for hatching later dragons effectively put a solid “paywall” in front of most players rather than gradually increasing the difficulty. And the PvP component is underdeveloped and uninteresting at this time. Its production values are good, however, and Social Point’s previous titles have performed well on Facebook, so it’s certainly one to keep an eye on for now, even if it has a long way to go before it becomes an absolute “must play.”